Month: September 2017

The ‘internet of things’ can conjure up grand visions of driverless cars speeding around ‘smart cities’ blanketed by billions of sensors communicating over 5G mobile networks. At a grassroots level, however, groups of citizens are starting to use the data and sensors for their own purposes.

If you will forgive the outburst of alliteration, the harvesting of a “hands-free hectare” at Harper Adams University has made headlines all around the world, in the technology press as well as the farming press.

A robot performed autonomous dental implant surgery on a patient for the first time last week. The hour-long surgery, which took place in Xian, Shaanxi province, China, was performed without intervention from medical staff, who were on hand in case something went wrong.

Over 100 CEOs of artificial intelligence and robotics firms recently signed an open letter warning that their work could be repurposed to build lethal autonomous weapons — “killer robots.” They argued that to build such weapons would be to open a “Pandora’s Box.” This could forever alter war.

Recently, the “trolley problem,” a decades-old thought experiment in moral philosophy, has been enjoying a second career, appearing in nightmare visions of a future in which cars make life-and-death decisions for us.